


The Last Virtue

by MarkoftheAsphodel



Category: Fire Emblem Echoes: Mou Hitori no Eiyuu Ou | Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, Fire Emblem Series
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, M/M, Video Game Mechanics, back from the dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-22
Updated: 2018-07-01
Packaged: 2019-02-05 07:06:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12789387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarkoftheAsphodel/pseuds/MarkoftheAsphodel
Summary: “She thought I was her hero,” Sir Clive says again. “And I made her into… this.” Of Forsyth and his ideals, the Deliverance, and the dark miracle wrought by a mad god.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This came out of two things: a discussion on the FE subreddit about how FE15 would've been if resurrected characters were treated as "zombies" the way their FE2 counterparts come across, and my friend Dameceles's initial blind playthrough of FE15 itself and its particular combination of character losses.

The new emperor of Rigel (and that disconcerts Forsyth to even think, but think it he must) wants to consult with Sir Clive about the plan to infiltrate the Temple of Duma. Forsyth hurries through the fresh snow as a few more flakes, thick and clumped like goose down, fall from the leaden sky. He coughs to clear a knot of phlegm from his throat before rapping at the tent flap.

"Sir Clive?"

He hears a low murmur in return, one that does not sound to be meant for him. Normal circumstances dictate that Forsyth approach this with respect and caution but nothing about this week is normal. He slides one finger into the tent flap and widens it just enough that he can place his eye to the gap.

Sir Clive has his back to Forsyth; he’s feeding Dame Mathilda.

Forsyth knows he shouldn’t watch but he can’t help himself as Sir Clive dips the spoon in yogurt, then in honey, then holds it at Mathilda’s lips. As Mathilda accepts the offering Forsyth, who has witnessed the noble couple feeding one another many a time before, cannot but see the lack of romantic import to this interaction. The great knight is closing her lips around the spoon with the rhythm of a baby bird. Her eyes are calm, she is smiling a little… and she is responding to the food, not to Sir Clive.

“Good, my sweet, good,” says Clive to his lady, and Forsyth steps back and seals the gap in the tent flap. It can wait. He follows his own footprints back to the emperor.

-x-

Dame Mathilda’s death was glorious, a moment to shine in the sagas of history. Despite the peril around him Forsyth could not look away as the battle goddess of Zofia charged Emperor Rudolf, only to be felled by a counterstrike that knocked her clear from her mount. The aftermath of that blow had not perhaps been so glorious; Forsyth can still hear an echo of her screams as she called out for Clive before falling silent. She has not said anything since that moment.

Mathilda attends the mid-morning briefing, fully dressed down to her battle diadem, but she again sits mute. Forsyth cannot keep from stealing glances at her during the briefing. The strange smile crosses her lips at intervals unconnected to any of the conversation around them. It brings to mind Forsyth's great-grandmother in the twilight of her days and so Forsyth hopes this is a symptom of adjustment, of coming back into life rather than slipping out of it in the manner of his great-grandmother.

"Ah, Forsyth?"

"Sir Clive!"

Forsyth jumps a little in his boots as Clive interrupts his reverie, and some of the briefing papers he's been putting away slip through his fingers. He hopes the senior knight has not caught him glancing too often at Dame Mathilda, though of course Forsyth had no improper intent, unless speculating on Mathilda’s mental state was itself not proper, as it probably wasn’t…

"How is Python faring today?"

"The same, sir," Forsyth replies, maintaining the tone he would use if asked about the horses or the convoy, though of course he is grateful that Sir Clive should spare a thought for Python's well-being in spite of his own turmoil these past few days.

"I think Mathilda does fare better this morning, though she hasn't yet managed to speak."

"I've not heard a word out of Python either, sir." This time Forsyth cannot quite keep to professional dispassion.

The oddity of a muted Python affects Sir Clive, for his mouth hangs open in a surprisingly graceless moment before he can reply. 

"It may be a normal part of their recovery. Was there not a legend of a princess brought back from death who was unable to speak for the same number of days she'd been in the tomb?”

"I seem to recall something along those lines, sir." And Forsyth does, or thinks he does. He thinks he's heard or read some legend on the matter, another grain of learning he'd discarded as not useful to his destiny.

-x-

It’s been three days since their pilgrimage to the hidden shrine and a week in total since the bloody, costly conquest of Rigel's stronghold.

Though Dame Mathilda's death is blazed into his memory, Forsyth missed the moment that Python fell. Lukas, lurking on the periphery of battle as was his wont, reported that Python had attempted to take on two of Rigel’s black magicians at once before they might draw in range of the rest of the party. He took out one, but did not succeed against the second. Forsyth didn't see it, missed any final words that Python might have offered him, and in truth the last thing he remembers Python saying was a word of encouragement to young Tobin, the village boy from Ram who'd become quite capable with a bow. In the four days Python was gone, Forsyth tried to comfort himself with that memory, a moment that might be enshrined as some genuine evidence of Python's decency as a man and a soldier before he died.

And then Lukas offered to him, and to Sir Clive, a most unexpected form of consolation. He thinks now not of final breaths he hadn't seen but of the miracle he'd witnessed at the hidden shrine, of the sacred water trickling out of his cupped hands and of the wonderful, terrible sound of Python choking his way back to life.

Four days gone from this life and three days restored. It would be surprising, Forsyth tells himself, if the price of restoration were not a few days' silence.

-x-

Forsyth does not remember the myths of his childhood in sufficient detail. He's come to regret that daily as _myth_ becomes ever more relevant to what once looked like a mundane coup. The singular myth of the knight was the only one he'd ever needed, and only once they crossed the border into Rigel did he begin to see that the _military_ aspect of waging war had grown entangled, even enshrouded, with a different sort of business, one not covered in the codices and chronicles he'd devoured over the years. There was nothing in those codices about offering up one's soul to the War Father.

Tucked inside the binding of one of these inadequate codices Forsyth yet carries are seven pages clipped from a children's book, one that helped propel his fancies toward the idea of knighthood two decades before. _A Pocket Book of Virtues_ , it was called, each virtue accompanied by a bit of doggerel. Forsyth cared only for the virtues expected of knights, had removed those pages and discarded the rest. In time, Python cut thin backings of wood for each page, thereby sealing away in a layer of glue the verses explaining each virtue.

_Courage. Generosity. Nobility. Hope. Faith. Justice. Mercy._

Each knightly virtue depicted in a bold black line drawing, the faces in silhouette and figures rendered with a delicate geometry, each virtuous figure set on a color-coded background-- red for courage, green for ever-renewing hope, and so on. The effect is rather like a stained-glass window, and Forsyth's often used them to brighten the drab inside of the tent and to thereby keep his mind on his ideals. In the lowest days of their fortune, when the Deliverance had to retreat to a catacomb plagued by shambling corpses, he'd had to reflect upon Courage and Hope. Once Alm turned the tide of the war against Zofian traitors and their Rigelian allies, he'd needed to keep Mercy in his thoughts.

Now he fans the Virtues out on the little camp table in case these bright relics of their childhood might spark some reaction in Python. Even contempt will do, Forsyth thinks.

-x-

Forsyth has a small portable chess set— carved by Python for a long-ago birthday, though Python always groans when Forsyth mentions the provenance— and Lukas makes for a most reliable chess partner. Python merely sits upon his cot, a strange silent presence behind Forsyth making himself felt yet never heard as they play.

"Why does the red knight of Courage appear to be slitting his own throat?” asks Lukas of the topmost card on the camp table as he positions his rook to counter Forsyth's queen.

"I'd never seen it in that light before, but upon reflection perhaps it might be interpreted that way," Forsyth says slowly. There is something awkward about the placement of the sword now that he considers it.

"Perhaps they all bear a second level of interpretation, as in divination," says Lukas as he placidly waits for Forsyth to make the obvious move that will trigger his counterattack.

Forsyth moves a pawn to buy himself some time.

Though sidelined from battle since his journey to Ram, Lukas in his diligence has made the most of each waking hour; he's studied every acre of terrain in their path, delved deep into the lore of the Duma sect to discern the nature of witches, and confirmed the existence and location of sacred springs like the very revival spring hidden within the secret shrine whose existence so puzzled the emperor on their initial visit. What he's brought to light in the process is that nothing in Valentia’s history is as simple as they've been taught.

Throughout Zofia they've stumbled upon places commemorating great knights and great victories of old as learned by Forsyth his self-directed studies of the land's martial history. Sometimes elderly villagers remember events, or remember what their own elders told them about a heroic grandfather or lost uncle. Often the truth bears little resemblance to what's been preserved in text and stone; Lukas and Forsyth heard one old man's assertion that a "massacre" of seventy years before was more of a rock fight, with a sheepdog as its only casualty. An elderly woman assured them that a group of heroes were known to their peers as the pack of town bullies. And so on. Another local hero, they found, was believed by the people of his own town to never have existed, to have been concocted as though from air, or perhaps borrowed from someplace else.

They've learned that behind the tidiest of stories lurks some older, stranger tale, and often behind that some still deeper truth that makes even less sense on its face. These side-quests for information may have in some way prepared them for the disorder around them as the reign of Duma and Mila crumbles. There is no returning to the simplicity of Mila's bountiful Zofia and Duma's stern Rigel now, thinks Forsyth as he and Lukas continue their abstraction of a battle on the chessboard, where red death and black earth still exist in opposition.

Sir Clive wants the reassurance of a tale wherein the hero conquers death and restores his true love and everything goes back as it was. There are multiple variants of that, says Lukas as he and Forsyth grind toward a stalemate. There's the tale of a young queen who accepts an early death to spare her husband that fate, and then an itinerant hero happens to wander by shortly after the funeral, wrestles the physical form of Death and restores the lady to her husband.There's the tale of newlyweds parted by some abrupt tragedy, a snakebite or marauding boar, and then the one lover descends into the Underworld to rescue the other and very nearly succeeds. And more, many more. There always is some catch to it, says Lukas. Vows of silence, lost memories, lovers parted for a set number of years. Some stories seem, he explains, to be purely literary, inventions of the golden age of Queen Zofia I. Others are older, much older, with roots that go back in the mists of time, speaking of places whose names cannot be found in any Valentian map. He tells Forsyth one about a queen whose lover fell on the battlefield and yet came home, no longer fully himself and never truly hers thereafter.

"Do none of these tales speak of resurrection springs?"

"It's curious," says Lukas. "The springs are attested to many times, and yet while many tales recount the effects of springs granting strength or speed or magical power, I've not uncovered a single reliable account of how someone fared after being revived by the waters. There does exist an old and garbled story of some hero whose touch imbued water with magic, so that any water they offered from their hands restored life."

"And what transpired in that tale?"

"It seems the hero refused, and let the one seeking his aid perish," says Lukas, and he places Forsyth's king in check.

-x-

Python won't eat on his own. Forsyth's essayed to feed him the way Clive so patiently tends to Mathilda and no matter what he tries, Python spits it out. On the fourth morning he bites Forsyth in the process and Forsyth, mindful of the hazards of human teeth and saliva, has to abandon the feeding to get Silque to tend to his hand.

"Four days of near-total fasting would take its toll on the body, would it not?" he asks her, knowing full well that it would. And yet Python hasn't lost any flesh nor even changed his color, which is no longer the livid tint of death but still not how Python ought to look.

Silque offers him some reassuring words that do not in truth reassure and Forsyth thinks they're both glad of it when Lukas comes in for his daily examination. Forsyth cradles his repaired hand, which still tingles from magic, as Lukas lets Silque view his bared belly- now smooth and unscarred, as though the damage the Ram Villagers swore had been done by a Terror that glowed and took all of them to subdue had never even happened. At Emperor Alm's urging, Lukas had taken the final drink of the sacred spring before it went dry, in hopes it might heal the wound in his gut that defied the staves of Silque and Tatiana. Their hopes have been rewarded fully, and Lukas is a curiosity now, something for their healers to marvel over and study.

"Are you available for practice this evening?" asks Forsyth when Silque announces Lukas is remarkably fit for duty.

He doesn't say that Python has not responded in the slightest to his invitation to spar and Forsyth is grateful that Lukas doesn't ask.

As the early dusk descends on their camp, Forsyth subjects Lukas and his newly healed body to a round of intense training, as though they might make up in a few days the ground Lukas has lost over months on the figurative bench.

"Python has followed us," says Lukas, and though Forsyth suspects it might be a ploy of distraction from his younger, smaller, and now decidedly weaker opponent, he turns to look.

It is no ploy. Python, dressed in his usual gear, is standing before the practice target that young Tobin set up earlier in the day. Forsyth watches as Python, his movements as fluid as the proverbial snake's, withdraws an arrow from his quiver, nocks it, and aims the bow. The arrow lands dead-center on the target, and Forsyth realizes he'd have been strangely relieved had Python reverted to form and missed the target entirely. Instead he can only turn to Lukas, his heart heavy with unspoken questions, and Lukas answers with a quizzical smile.

Python makes every one of his shots until the bullseye is obliterated, but at the end of this display of unparalleled skill Forsyth feels on some intangible level almost as battered as the target. He cannot sleep easily that night and reaches out for a card of Virtue to sustain him through another night in Python's silent presence. As he studies the card in the torchlight that seeps through the tent he realizes the orange knight of Generosity is cutting his own hand. Forsyth sees now not the magnificence of his figure, the savage beauty of the axe at his side, but the sword plunged into the churned earth of a new grave and the drops of blood falling from the mutilated hand. He has not the faintest idea anymore what in this embodies Generosity or what his younger self saw in it. Perhaps the poem, now concealed and long effaced from his memory, gave it some clarity.

Forsyth sets it aside and contemplates Python's motionless figure upon the opposite cot. No, not motionless-- Python breathes. He eats nothing, has drunk nothing but the waters of the spring itself, lies on his cot but does not sleep. And yet something propels him to do the daily tasks of a soldier, to put on his gear, to string his bow, to swing into the saddle of his horse. Something guides him to make perfect shots like he never has in all of his life.

It's as though waging war is his only purpose, Forsyth thinks, and once that thought enters his head he wishes it never had crystallized.

**To Be Continued**


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At the ends of the known world, Forsyth reaches an understanding beyond the reach of his codices.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This threatened to run into three parts, so I took a break from it, restructured it, and kept it within the length it should've been. :/

“Mathilda is not yet herself,” Sir Clive says to them the next morning as Forsyth and Lukas enter the briefing tent.

He does not say what they both can see in his bloodshot eyes and ill-tied cravat, that if Dame Mathilda isn't herself, then Sir Clive cannot be _his_ proper self. 

Forsyth studies random documents in his portfolio during the briefing, when normally every word of the plan would hold his full attention for the sake of the emperor, Sir Clive, and his own advancement. In his distraction that morning he's thrust one of the cards into his papers. The golden-hued knight of Nobility is kneeling before a robed and crowned couple. Forsyth always took it for a moment of accolade, the new knight receiving honors from his sovereigns. It now occurs to him that flames lick the surface of the book in the king’s hands. It might not be a book of law or prayer, Forsyth thinks as he stares into the blacked-out face of the golden knight. Sometimes it seems to Forsyth he no longer understands anything.

He closes the portfolio, folds his hands atop it, and does his best to listen to Sir Mycen's advice on storming Duma Temple.

-x-

They reach Rigel's great castle the following day. Time is of the essence and yet they hesitate on the precipice of the planned assault on Duma's temple. Sir Mycen bade them to prepare well before entering the passage that links castle and temple and they are not prepared, and Forsyth knows that his superiors hesitate to incur any more losses. He's glad of that, because some part of Forsyth is not quite as blithe about the prospect of laying down his life as he'd been only a week before. He still would, of course, if Emperor Alm and Sir Clive asked it of him as the price of victory. He just might not do it so... joyfully.

“Ah. Forsyth, have you a moment?”

“Don't you sleep anymore?” asks Forsyth, and almost winces at how sharp the words are to his own ears. Lukas doesn't seem to mind.

“I may have found something that can explain the situation with Python,” he says, and it strikes Forsyth how some new zeal has been lit within Lukas. Forsyth would’ve liked to credit it to restored health and vitality after long months of suffering from that tainted wound… but he has to wonder.

Rigel’s great library is filled with scrolls and tomes, some of them in runes that none of then can decipher-- not Lukas, not Luthier, not anyone. Others feature an ancient flowing script that could almost be mistaken for mere ornamentation; had Forsyth endless time he might’ve been able to tease meaning out of them with his own trained eye, but of course there is almost no time at all to expend on this.

But Lukas doesn’t sleep, apparently, and so he’s found something— a fragment of text, a citation of a citation.

“There’s this reference to sorcery from before the dawn of the calendar that involved fiends taking the bodies of enemies they feared or respected and making of them puppets.”

“Let me see it.”

The tome is ancient but not bafflingly so, the writing something that Forsyth can validate without much trouble.

“It's a first-century priest writing about something that allegedly happened two centuries before that,” says Lukas as Forsyth scans the text.

“ _And this was done, they say, in the manner of the Dread Lords who know naught but zeal for combat and cannot recognize their loved ones_ , yet this cannot be for the War Father assures us that such foul sorceries that make a mockery of the most brave and strong have never reached our shores and will never be permitted under his eminence.”

Forsyth reads over it three times in succession, then asks aloud, “What is the assurance of a War Father gone mad?”

Lukas can’t answer that, of course. But it’s so close, so terribly close to his own worst suspicions on the nature of Dame Mathilda and Python. Not themselves, but automata, like puppets designed to wage combat with enough life breathed into them to fulfill that task and nothing more.

When he sees Python now, alert and ready for the next battle but _not himself_ , what echoes in Forsyth’s head is the terrible question, “Is this the will of Duma manifest?” He cannot sleep that night— not that it matters, as the attack has been delayed yet another day. Forsyth lights a candle and holds up one of those once-beloved cards. _Hope_ is a dying pegasus knight, her arm upraised toward a crowned sun as two small plants spring up from her dark blood upon the snow. This at least still is explicable to him and still reassures him somewhat. 

Hope is a virtue. Hope outlasts a dying heart and does not dissipate with one’s final breath.

Forsyth spends a great deal of time that night delivering a monologue on the nature of Hope to his companion; some part of him hopes it will lull him to sleep and the rest of him wishes that Python will tell him to shut up. Neither happens, and in a dark hour well past midnight Forsyth stands above Python’s bed in the flickering candlelight. Python’s eyes are closed now; perhaps he sleeps. Perhaps he is dormant, like the reptile itself.

“Must I rouse you with a kiss?”

It’s a wild thought and Forsyth is not entirely sure what brought it into his head. Yet they’ve crossed over into the world of myth and Forsyth is willing to try anything. His lips upon Python’s meet not the profound chill of death but the lesser chill of someone who's been too long in the cold. Python gags, rejecting Forsyth as he rejects mundane offerings of food. His eyes open but there is nothing in them of friendship, of brotherhood… even of anger.

Hope is not this one-sided conversation with Python. Forsyth has nothing now but a foul taste on his lips, the taste of all those spurned offerings.

-x-

Sir Clive has not bothered to shave this morning. He has no excuses for his lady; he need not confess that Dame Mathilda is not herself, will never be herself, that his beloved is some manner of monster and he the agent of her resurrection as such. They can all see for themselves, as he’s brought her along to council— fully clothed and armored, awaiting the command to fight. 

Forsyth tarries after the council to see if there is something, anything, he can do to ease the mental distress of his superior, and instead has the uncertain privilege of watching Sir Clive crumble.

“She took me for a hero. I am not… I am…”

“You must keep faith, Sir Clive.”

“Faith?”

Clive laughs, and the bitterness of his laugh makes Forsyth's face burn with chagrin at having said anything. What does a word like that even mean as they make ready to assault the stronghold of the Duma Faithful?

“She thought I was her hero,” Sir Clive says again. “And I made her into… this.”

And there is nothing Forsyth can do or say to offer any consolation. He returns to his chamber and his pack of cards, picks up the one representing Faith and sees now the macabre details that his childish mind simply absorbed without analysis. A lone figure kneels in a wasteland strewn with bones of men and monster and the moon casts a shadow of his lance over the dunes. The scene is not the aftermath of a great victory and the knight’s prayer is no thanks for that victory. Those bones have lain in the dunes for many a long year, and the knight is crossing that wasteland with only prayers to sustain him.

Forsyth hears Python’s voice now, not with his ears but inside his own head.

_“Why’d you want to cross that, anyway? There's probably nothing on the other side but more bones and sand.”_

It is not some moment of communion with the figure of Python lurking behind him. It’s the part of Python that’s become part of his own soul over the years of their friendship, the part that understands and regrets Python at his worst yet loves him at his best. There is more of Python remaining in Forsyth’s own psyche than there is in Python’s body.

“Do you think they have souls?” he asks Lukas in a low moment of the mid-afternoon— Lukas, after all, speaks with such confidence on the matter of witches.

“I regret that I can’t answer that with any authority,” says Lukas, meaning there’s nothing in the books he’s yanked off the library shelves that gives him an answer and nothing wrung from Rigelian captives to shed any light.

Lukas does have the message Forsyth welcomes and dreads.

“We breach the passage tomorrow.”

-x-

That night he treats Python’s automaton to a monologue on the nature of Justice. Forsyth never understood that one, not really, other than the image rendered in violet was beautiful-- a man divided, half in sable armor and half exposed, with the shadow of a raven’s wing above him. A tower rising behind him, half dark and half light. A massive sword in his grasp, a twin to the sword just visible beneath it. Forsyth's young brain took it to represent the dual aspects of Justice, the justice under the king's law and the justice under heaven. Maybe it still does and it's the nature of Justice itself that he misunderstands, can't recognize.

He recognizes nothing of justice at all once they breach the passage. It's all a waste. Fernand, ravaged by flames and dying (a despicable person to be sure, but his death is as another blade sent through poor Sir Clive's heart). Lord Berkut, mad with power, accompanied by a wraith of flames that had been his bride. The remains of the Earth Mother, a sword through her skull. Forsyth carries brave words on his lips but in his heart the main thing he wants is to survive this. Amid these horrors it’s a relief to see Dame Mathilda, resplendent on her steed, make a glorious charge, as beautiful again as her lunge at Emperor Rudolf, and land a direct strike upon the degenerate “god” before them.

Duma destroys her for it but the great paladin did her part in taking him down. It’s something Forsyth can at least take some comfort in as he walks over to Python’s slumped figure after Emperor Alm ends the battle with a blow from his divine sword. Python, too, did his part that day— more than Forsyth, perhaps, because self-preservation never occurred to what remained of Python.

Forsyth can hear the echo of his own voice, that terrible lack of understanding in Rigel Castle's bloody courtyard not so many days before. 

_For goodness’ sake, get up, Python._

“Be at rest,” he says now, his chilled fingers lacing awkwardly through Python's unruly hair. He doesn’t want to look at what’s left of Python’s face. He should feel so much more than he does, Forsyth thinks, but there’s only the low thrum of one phrase going through his mind.

_It’s over it’s over it’s finally over._

“Forsyth? I am sorry to interrupt…”

It's Lukas, looking bright and happy, as though renewed by this final battle rather than exhausted by it.

“Lord Conrad of Zofia has also fallen. If Princess Anthiese were inclined to visit one of the remaining shrines in hopes of reviving her brother…” Lukas inclines his head, and Forsyth thinks again how _young_ Lukas looks to him now. “Perhaps its powers will be less perverse now that Duma has been defeated.”

“We cannot go through this again,” says Forsyth. Those are the only words he can even make himself say. 

-x-

They lay their dead to rest in the Temple of Duma, the first step in consecrating anew what's been defiled by madness. Princes and nobles of Zofia and Rigel are united in slumber at the altar... and among them, one who was neither noble nor sworn knight nor anyone of consequence to the world, save that he died to preserve it. No one else suggests, this time, any pilgrimage to any hidden shrines. There is something fated, perhaps, in the way the resurrected were granted a role in the final battle. Even Lord Conrad in his own way had come back from “death” and now they are truly gone, bodies stilled and souls, one hopes, at peace with the task completed.

There's the word again-- hope.

Forsyth sits among the things that were Python's, staring not at relics of his lost companion but of his own departed self, of an innocence that came to the barrens of Rigel to die. He holds the fan of seven cards, the hand he's effectively dealt himself by discarding all the other virtues offered to him. In the center of the fan is Mercy, its background of pure white illuminated with touches of the other six colors, to let even a preliterate child know this must be the ultimate virtue. The figure of a beautiful knightess descends from her winged steed with sword in hand to pass judgment over the wretch cowering at her feet. Forsyth's always believed the knight’s mercy was in sparing the wretch, in letting him go forth in the world to find his own redemption.

Here at the end of the known world, Forsyth comprehends a different form of mercy from a different Book of Virtues from the one his mother once pressed into his small hands, just as he sees the deep and twisted truth behind every tidy virtue that's been drilled into him... no, that he's drilled into himself. He chose this road for himself and upon this road, the greatest courage is in letting the blade fall against your own neck and the greatest mercy is bringing that blade down on the one you love most. Hope is a poison and faith is a horror and justice itself something terrible to behold... and nobility consists of embracing all that as your lot and then kneeling before your executioner in the belief you've done well.

He's done well, Forsyth has. He'll get that knighthood he wanted as soon as they return to Zofia; their king-emperor already said as much. Meanwhile the gods are dead and so is Python. What else is left?

“Walk with me, Forsyth,” says Sir Clive.

“Of course, Sir Clive,” he replies. He does not promise Anywhere, he does not promise Always, and something deep within Forsyth knows he never will again

Lukas joins them, rounding out their trio in his self-contained silence, and they walk single-file along the ramparts of Rigel Castle as the declining sun casts their long shadows against the snow below. For a moment Forsyth perceives a flicker of color around his own shadow, some trick of the light. He pauses, expecting it to be gone when he looks again over the ramparts, and yet there it is-- an aureole painted in the snow, a saint's halo gracing his own head, radiant with every color of the rainbow, every sacred virtue. 

_Why’d you want it this much, anyway?_

The light itself grants unto Forsyth its absolution and yet there is no clarity in it, no comfort, only the ghost of his own cold breath on the bitter air.

**The End**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The light phenomenon at the end is called a "glory" and it's quite real. You can often see them from a plane around the shadow of a plane when conditions are right. 
> 
> So this assumes that Tellius was indeed in the very distant past of the Jugdral/Archanea/Valentia world. Hence three cards from the more distant myths of Tellius and four from Jugdral's sagas, all of them served up to the Zofians of Forsyth's time with the accuracy you'd expect over 2,200-1,000 years.
> 
> Red = Courage = Eldigan (dead whether he stands up to Sigurd on behalf of his homeland or stands up to his king)  
> Orange = Generosity = Greil (taking steps to ensure he never again uses that sword)  
> Yellow = Nobility = Sigurd (about to get fried)  
> Green = Hope = Erinys (doing her best on behalf of Silesse)  
> Blue = Faith = Finn (having a lovely time in the desert)  
> Violet = Justice = Zelgius (the Last True Knight according to the subordinate who dies for him)  
> All colors = Mercy = Elincia (based on her skill)

**Author's Note:**

> Myths cited in this include (from our world): Alcestis and Admetus, Orpheus and Eurydice, and Fionn and Diarmuid. Keen readers will catch a passing and much-distorted reference to Lewyn and Erinys from FE4/5 and a few other "echoes" (cough) of that world... not to mention the source material for the Seven Virtues. Stay tuned!


End file.
